Literally any book that you now dislike due to school. This also applies to other literature styles as well.
Mine is The Hunger Games. I had to read it las year in school and it drove me insane. We started doing the novel study in early February and didn’t finish until May. I finished the book in less than two weeks, so I was pretty much just reading personal books all through English class for close to two months.
It’s not even like we had to analyze it super intensely. It was projects like ‘Make a playlist for a character of your choice’ and we had vocabulary tests every week, that were a joke. It was multiple choice for words like quest and forage. I know that English wasn’t everyone’s first language but come on.
I didn’t even like the book that much in the first place, so all of this was just adding to the misery.
Not a book, but an author. The summer reading they had us read in middle school tended to be heavy and difficult subject matter… Exactly what you don’t want to spend your summers thinking about.
One year it was Into Thin Air and I just did not appreciate Krakauer’s writing. I felt like I was reading a very long magazine article instead of a personal account of what he went through on Everest. I thought it was uncannily detached in a documentarian kind of way. I guess I found that detachment shocking or distasteful as a kid. I didn’t really know anything about PTSD then and no one really explained it to me either.
Also, since it was summer reading, we had to discuss it after school started up again. It just drew it out too long for me.
Made me never want to read Krakauer again, and I haven’t. Although thinking about it now, maybe I would like to reread Into Thin Air as an adult? Or another book by him…one day I hope.